Audio Production Revival with Sony and Native Instruments

My recent upgrade to ACID Pro 6.0 marks the years-languishing revival in rasx() music production. This upgrade moves the Songhay System out of the Sonic Foundry era and into the Sony future.

Bundled with ACID Pro 6.0 is Native Instruments Kompakt—this little package immediately made me recall (and install) my years-old investment in Kontakt (my current version 1.5). My relationship with music making is the most stereotypically emotionally unstable affair of that timid character with stage fright and a load of insecurities—so me forgetting why I bought into the Kontakt line should not be surprising.

Now that I am a lowly Blog writer, now is a great opportunity to record an important reason why Kontakt is my sampler of choice: Kontakt is compatible with “ancient,” soft-instrument formats such as Sound Font 2 (SF2) and GigaStudio (a complete list of formats is at native-instruments.com). My intent was not to lose my ‘legacy’ investments in the E-MU APS boards loaded on my Windows 98 Black Audio workstation.

Now, as I stumble about in this new light trying to focus through squinting, here are some random notes:

• It is refreshing and clarifying to me to see the sampler as the alternative (or even the successor) of the synthesizer. The big bang of sampling history starts with the Fairlight CMI.
• Without the benefit of a human instrumentalist, Kontakt is my chosen alternative for developing a lead instrument. The new MIDI features in ACID and my new dual-core system make working with Kontakt much easier.
• My cousin, Quincy Frank, keeps telling me to drop everything and go for that Swedish thang, Reason. My cousin is accustomed to using real metal boxes to make samples—and this is one of the superficial reasons why he likes Reason (because the interface looks just like real metal boxes). My view toward audio comes from the Sound Forge world and ACID just extends on that—in my world, the audio wave forms sitting in tracks is what I am used to…

rasx()